Set My Heart on Fire

Izumi Suzuki’s book, Set My Heart on Fire, is one that is truly going to stay with me for a very long time. I thought I was picking up an ‘aesthetic’ novel and delving into a world where I don’t really have too many cultural references to: the underground bar and club scene of 1970s Tokyo. And while it is that for sure, it also reads way beyond its time and place. This is a book about how youth slips away without asking permission and about the roles we, especially women, play just to feel real while it’s happening.

This novel is autofiction and the protagonist is also named Izumi. We follow her over roughly ten years as she moves through addiction, friendships, and romantic relationships. The first bit of the novel takes place in dim, grungy bars, with a killer playlist (found these playlists: YouTube, Spotify). The music describes the cultural dynamic, featuring popular ‘Western’ bands like The Zombies, The Rolling Stones, and The Mamas & the Papas alongside Japanese psychedelic rock bands such as The Tigers and The Tempters. The music situates the novel in a time period where listening to albums on record all in one go was something to do with friends. Forming community around music in this way sounds romantic now. The playlist isn’t just to drive the narrative or act as emotional shorthand though, as is often the case in books where music is referenced. Music in Set My Heart on Fire is a way to capture time and youth. We all look back nostalgically at music from our youth and experience a visceral remembrance. This book evokes that feeling for Izumi and for the reader, both explicitly and implicitly. Music as memory storage. 

The way we perceive time is a constant theme in the book. At one point, Izumi’s friend, Etsuko says: “I never knew it would end. We were so young. Those days will never come back. I know that sounds like a line from some drippy ballad.” It’s such an ordinary line that I’ve even heard some folks around me say. The point is that we all have some understanding of this feeling. Youth doesn’t announce its departure, it just stops working the way it used to. I can’t pinpoint when ‘youthful abandon’ ended, and I still tend to think that I’m youthful but of course it’s not the same and that’s not a bad thing but it is cause for nostalgia we can lose ourselves in if we aren’t careful. 

Another assumption I had when I picked up the book was that with every chapter we’d flit from bar to bar, experiencing the underground scene through Izumi’s eyes. The book does start out this way, but then it changes a lot in the second half. It’s an abrupt end to that part of Izumi’s life and we grapple with the loss that comes with growing up. A catalyst for that ‘growth’ is Izumi’s relationship with Jun, which is clearly harmful to her. It starts off immediately bad but the extent of how horrible it gets is only revealed through snippets of conversations with friends throughout the years. We see her both mentally and physically diminishing, but we also see her stay in her circumstances out of apathy which itself is borne out of a deep-rooted belief that she is undeserving. 

Reading about Izumi’s relationships with her friends and men prompted me to think about the different masks and performances we put on to appease others. Women are especially raised to do so. For Izumi, the way she performs and the attention she gets in response is a way for her to chase a high. It’s familiar and almost subconscious the way we do this. Suzuki is perceptive about the social dynamics between men and women but not in an overtly theoretical way. She shows how these small performances give way to Izumi’s high and sense of self. Women adapt themselves to men; men accept the adaptation as natural. Izumi curates herself as ‘different than the other girls’ and the men appear to pick that up as ‘you understand me unlike other girls’ and she knows it. 

I’ve grown tired of reading books by men where women are treated as mysterious, manipulative creatures, unknowable and symbolic rather than human. Suzuki offers something else. Izumi is self-aware and yet trapped. She recognizes the roles she plays even as she continues to play them, but doesn't see another way to exist. It made me think of my own twenties and the different versions of myself that I tried on. Making compromises without realising they were compromises to fit in certain circles and mistaking endurance for strength. Izumi makes so many allusions to ‘bearing it’, ‘enduring it’, the way women are conditioned to do so and how ‘being adaptable or accommodating’ as a woman is seen as virtue. Reading Set My Heart on Fire didn’t make me nostalgic so much for my twenties, but rather it helped me be gentler with myself by helping me understand those experiences a bit better. 

Now it’s impossible to separate this book from Izumi Suzuki’s life given that it’s auto-fiction. Suzuki died by suicide at the age of thirty-six. Reading her alongside other notable contemporary Japanese writers like Osamu Dazai and Yukio Mishima, both of whom also took their own lives, made me think about this genre, where self-exposure is the plot. Scholars have written about alienation, dependency, and anomie in modern Japan, about what it means to come of age in a culture rapidly reshaping itself. I’d read Mishima and Dazai in the last year and although they aren’t set in exactly the same eras, it was refreshing to read a woman’s perspective, rather than again, reading about women as though they are unknowable creatures. That sense of alienation isn’t abstract; it’s grounded in a very specific historical moment.

The book references real events, like the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries bombing and far-left extremist movements in passing, adding layers and nuance to the backdrop. A nuclear cloud appears briefly in a nightmare, a reminder that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not distant history, but lived memory. This is not the tidy, sanitised image of Japan often presented in the West.

The book opened up historical questions for me and personal ones as well. I found myself thinking about Yoko Ono, who was mentioned a few times, in the context of what it meant for a Japanese woman caught between cultures to be attached to one of the most famous men in the world. It made me think about migration, as there are several references to characters who leave Japan for the U.S. and what it means to be part of the cohort who stay behind, especially when staying in touch requires letters, not instant messages. It reminded me about my parents, and how technology has allowed them to reconnect with people they once lost simply because distance became too wide. 

Time behaves strangely in Set My Heart on Fire. There are references to parallel universes, to lives that might have unfolded differently. The prose in these moments is especially beautiful — delicate without being sentimental. It suggests that we are always standing beside other versions of ourselves, even if we never meet them.

When I finished the book, I didn’t feel closure so much as resonance. It’s the kind of text that doesn’t resolve its questions, but sharpens them. It reminded me that youth is not just something we lose, but something we survive — often imperfectly, often by wearing masks we later have to unlearn.

I didn’t expect to find myself in this book. But I did. And I suspect I’ll be carrying it with me for a long time.

Final Rating: 5/5